What is love? What is not love?

⁴Love is patient; love is kind and is not jealous;

Patient, do I want to be patient? Why is being patient important? I went to an online dictionary to find more details about being patient. Here is what I found.

pa-tient -adjective dictionary.com

Bearing provocation, annoyance, misfortune, delay, hardship, pain, etc., with fortutude and calm and without complaint, anger, or the like.(emphasis added):

All this bad stuff is coming at me and then – with – all this good stuff is how I’m suppose to react. If this was a business arrangement it would stink. But love is not a business contract it is a life commitment. So far this sounds too dry, so let’s get back to the emotional side of love.

As I think of the fantasy that love and intimacy can, and should, be at the beginning of a great relationship, I think back to when I first kissed my wife – WOW!! I was on cloud 9, whatever that means. Have you ever thought about these expressions that we say over and over but we never know where they originated? Anyway, where was I, Oh yea – WOW!!

Then I remembered when I became a Christian. WOW! I now had confidence in my eternal salvation. I know that God’s love for me and my love for my wife are different kinds of love. But this whole new side of love opened up to me when I became a Christian. And a whole new love opened up in my heart when I fell in love with my wife. The question became, am I to be an example of God’s love to my new wife and kids? Is God going to use me to redefine their definition of how love works? Am I going to be able to love my wife as I want God to love me? How is this all going to look in real life, “where the rubber meets the road”.

But then I started thinking how patient God has been with me. I reread the definition of the word patient. OK, I know I haven’t been annoying…well maybe a little. But only when I’m sick, hungry, tired, and maybe, well now that I think about it??? And God was right there being calm, without complaint or anger. OK, then I needed to take a deeper look at my relationship with my wife. Am I as patient with my wife as God has been patient with me?

NO!! I’ll never be able match His level of patience, but I’m willing to try.

Then I went on:

love is kind All right!! Now you’re talking. I know I’m kind, at least I can think of a couple of times that I have been kind,

and is not jealous; Two in a row I’m not jealous, well maybe that one time, but anyway what else;

love does not brag and is not arrogant, back to back success I don’t brag, if I do say so myself. And I’m not arrogant like most people, I’m just better than most people at not being arrogant.

⁵ does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, This is where I hit the brakes and came to a sketching halt.

Wrong suffered.

I need to stop and think of how many wrongs my wife has suffered. I’ll get back to you later.

Hi I'm back. I had to think, how many times did my wife get yelled at by her ex-husband. How often does she think of the bad times in her life. What do I do that might trigger these images.